Fortunately the typhoon broke more to the south, and had no other result than to sweep away the mist which had been accumulating during the last three days.
In an hour they had traversed the hundred and twenty-five miles of the Korean strait, and while the typhoon was raging on the coast of China, the "Albatross" was over the Yellow Sea. During the 22nd and 23rd she was over the Gulf10 of Pechelee, and on the 24th she was ascending11 the valley of the Peiho on her way to the capital of the Celestial12 Empire.
Leaning over the rail, the two colleagues, as the engineer had told them, could see distinctly the immense city, the wall which divides it into two parts—the Manchu town, and the Chinese town—the twelve suburbs which surround it, the large boulevards which radiate from its center, the temples with their green and yellow roofs bathed in the rising sun, the grounds surrounding the houses of the mandarins; then in the middle of the Manchu town the eighteen hundred acres of the Yellow town, with its pagodas14, its imperial gardens, its artificial lakes, its mountain of coal which towers above the capital; and in the center of the Yellow town, like a square of Chinese puzzle enclosed in another, the Red town, that is the imperial palace, with all the peaks of its outrageous15 architecture.
Below the "Albatross" the air was filled with a singular harmony. It seemed to be a concert of Aeolian harps16. In the air were a hundred kites of different forms, made of sheets of palm-leaf, and having at their upper end a sort of bow of light wood with a thin slip of bamboo beneath. In the breath of the wind these slips, with all their notes varied17 like those of a harmonicon, gave forth18 a most melancholy19 murmuring. It seemed as though they were breathing musical oxygen.
It suited Robur's whim20 to run close up to this aerial orchestra, and the "Albatross" slowed as she glided21 through the sonorous22 waves which the kites gave off through the atmosphere.
But immediately an extraordinary effect was produced amongst the innumerable population. Beatings of the tomtoms and sounds of other formidable instruments of the Chinese orchestra, gun reports by the thousand, mortars23 fired in hundreds, all were brought into play to scare away the aeronef. Although the Chinese astronomers24 may have recognized the aerial machine as the moving body that had given rise to such disputes, it was to the Celestial million, from the humblest tankader to the best-buttoned mandarin13, an apocalyptical monster appearing in the sky of Buddha25.
The crew of the "Albatross" troubled themselves very little about these demonstrations26. But the strings27 which held the kites, and were tied to fixed28 pegs29 in the imperial gardens, were cut or quickly hauled in; and the kites were either drawn30 in rapidly, sounding louder as they sank, or else fell like a bird shot through both wings, whose song ends with its last sigh.
A noisy fanfare31 escaped from Tom Turner's trumpet32, and drowned the final notes of the aerial concert. It did not interrupt the terrestrial fusillade. At last a shell exploded a few feet below the "Albatross," and then she mounted into the inaccessible33 regions of the sky.
Nothing happened during the few following days of which the prisoners could take advantage. The aeronef kept on her course to the southwest,
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